Hope or Despair

I awoke this morning with a great sense of foreboding for the lost. Without Jesus Christ there is nothing but false hope, lies, and deception that lead the lost.

This is truly a dismal way of life with an ending of eternal torment and fear. On the other hand, for those who are truly saved, they live a life of great hope in truth, eternal life in paradise, with a reward of everlasting joy and security.

Allow me to attempt to illustrate what went through my mind during the night.

Imagine yourself in a hallway; the hallway has no distinguishing attributes whatsoever with the exception of two doors. You walk this hallway for a time before you get to the area where the doors are located.

This hallway represents our lives before the age of discernment—the age where we can understand right and wrong and the choice of salvation or condemnation. For some this comes early and for others later, but it will come.

Now, at the end of the hall the two doors stand, and you can open both of them and then choose which one you will go through.

You open one of the doors and before you is a wide and winding road, and on either side of the road in every curve there seems to be every pleasurable thing you can imagine.

Contained behind open doors of buildings that seem to have no ends are places of physical comfort, of great wealth, places of pleasures of the flesh, and of every deviant happening.

As you peer down the road these buildings seem endless and masses of people are filing into them, but it strikes you odd that no one is coming out.

Looking towards the end of that wide road, it just appears to end. You cannot seem to comprehend what lies at the end, but you somehow know there is something else, and you have an uneasy sense about what is beyond the end of the road.

Opening the other door, you see a very narrow path traversing uphill for a long time. This path looks to be rocky in places and steep at times.

There are places of great beauty and animals abound everywhere. There are rugged, barren places and people walking the narrow path; all of whom seem to be determined to reach their goal.

As you gaze towards the end of the path, it leads straight and narrow to the most beautiful gate your mind can conceive.

The gate is narrow, too, and you have an overwhelming knowledge that on the other side of the gate is every good thing—things so good and never ending, in fact, your feeble mind can’t even imagine them.

In the distance beyond the gate is a mansion that elicits an unexplainable feeling of home to you. Along the road leading up to it, there seems to be family members and friends waiting on you; it is so beautiful it defies description.

Obviously, I am describing the choice of Salvation or choosing to live a worldly life. That wide and winding road is the path to destruction; the straight narrow path is the path to Heaven.

We were given a choice. Just as in the time of Noah the people were given an Ark to save them if they would only choose to be saved, we were given the Savior Jesus Christ to be saved if we only choose to believe.

The people in Noah’s time refused to believe the rain was coming and the world would be destroyed by a flood and so they perished. In our time we have been given a Savior, the only begotten Son of God, and this time the earth will be destroyed by fire! It is a matter of if we choose to believe.

I pray that you come to believe.

Kenneth Kellar
A Man Called by God to Teach and Disciple